


Memento Mori

by crackleviolet



Series: Violets are Blue [13]
Category: Mystic Messenger (Video Game)
Genre: Miscarriage, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-29
Updated: 2017-06-18
Packaged: 2018-09-20 17:19:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9502157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crackleviolet/pseuds/crackleviolet
Summary: Tragedy hits Jumin, V and MC. Help comes from an unexpected place.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> MC is now named! Her name is Nari, which means 'Lily'!

The anesthesia was wearing off and with it came a thousand thoughts. A thousand and one individual discomforts.

The first thing that crossed her mind when she opened her eyes was how bright the room was; so bright that it hurt and she closed them again.

Where was she anyway? Every time she tried to remember, she forgot what it was she was looking for.

The sheets around her were starchy- _scratchy_ -and someone was stroking her hand. Someone whose hands were so gentle that she found herself remembering her own first day of school.

She remembered her Mother kneeling down to check her backpack, even if she couldn’t quite remember her face.

“Now, Nari,” she had said, “be sure to be on your best behaviour.”

And the little, child sized her had jumped up for a kiss to the forehead, promising that she would do her very best. Nari didn’t know why it brought tears to her eyes.

The more she thought about it, the more she realized her lips were dry. At the back of her mind was the glass of water she knew she wanted, but the moment she thought of it, she forgot how thirsty she was and remembered the ocean instead.

The same ocean that lazily lapped the shore as she Jumin and V dined on the deck of the Kim family’s summer home: one of many residences that V’s parents retired to when inspiration proved fruitless. According to V, his Father would sit by the water with a blank canvas and a tortured stare, all while his Mother played the piano in the front room.

Nari didn’t know what she had expected from that sort of description but, as she stood in front of what could only be described as a palace, she knew that it wasn’t that. The house stretched three floors, with high domed ceilings and Greek style pillars, all with wide, enormous windows that faced the ocean.

Jumin insisted they eat fresh shellfish, leaving V to grimace wholeheartedly at the prospect of broiling sea creatures. Nari had watched them squabble with a glass of clear water and enjoyed the ocean breeze instead.

Had she fallen asleep at the table, perhaps? Would she wake up to discover that night had fallen?

 _No_. No, she knew that was wrong.

She distinctly remembered walking across the beach in an ivory dress of Jumin’s choosing, following V as he examined the skyline for the perfect angle of the setting sun. She remembered the grains of sand in her toes and each individual shade of pink and orange and burning red in the sky.

When they found the spot, she knew that she had turned to look for Jumin. He had been with them when they left the house, although the moment they crossed the threshold, he dialed Jaehee’s number to check on Elizabeth and walked several paces behind them, following their footsteps in the sand.

“I understand,” he said, subconsciously fiddling with his bag. “Hmm…a signature should do. An extra stamp if you have doubts…mhmm…good. Send me an update at the earliest convenience.”

He hung up the phone and joined them at the waterside, just as V adjusted his lens.

“Everything alright at the office?”

His tone was dry, but as he glanced up from his camera, Nari recalled that his smile was genuine. So too was Jumin’s despairing sigh.

“For some reason my Father is passing a new project onto my department,” he said. “He knows that the new RFA party is only a couple of months away. He knows I have contractors coming to lay down the foundations of our house next week. Why would he do this?”

 _Ah, yes…That was it_ …Nari remembered.

They had gone to Jeju to chase up some last minute business connections for the next RFA party. Only her second as the party planner and she would be lying if she said she didn’t feel the pressure. Despite her best efforts, she had already postponed it twice because of outside complications.

“You know,” she had said, “we can go back whenever you want to…Jaehee-”

“-is keeping me informed on the situation.”

Even though she remembered it correctly, at the back of her mind, she knew that something about it was wrong. Something her drug addled brain was not quite ready to comprehend.

What was it?

_What_

_was_

_it_

She remembered the weight of their combined silence as she waded into the water.

“ _Fuck_ that’s cold,” she had said, only submerged as far as her ankles and already feeling as if she stood in the middle of the arctic circle.

Could it be that she had never left the ocean? Was that the thing that was so very wrong?

She remembered reaching to embrace the setting sun and gasping at the incredible beauty of its reflection on the water. A part of her knew that this was the shot that made it into a frame at the penthouse; the one that Jumin would smugly stand in front of while taking a sip of wine.

She wasn’t in the ocean anymore either; she knew that much. She was still cradled in starched sheets and the same person stroked her hand that had been holding onto it from the beginning. Whenever she reached out for the setting sun, they held onto her that much tighter.

She knew she had forgotten something, but could not hold onto a coherent thought any more than she could the surrounding waters.

She remembered diving into the waters with V after taking that initial amber frame. The chance to photograph her swimming by moonlight was all he had wanted ever since they arrived on the island and it seemed wrong to refuse him, even if it left Jumin practically spitting feathers.

“You’ll both catch pneumonia,” he had said, turning to the business section. “And then what will we do?”

“Well first I expect we’ll cry about it,” Nari had said, leaning in from behind to kiss his cheek. “And then we’ll call you.”

His concerns were not without merit. Nari recalled the chill of the ocean water and the strange way that her hair and dress billowed around her. V’s camera was waterproof and he dived down a little further than she was, giving her the thumbs up when he was ready to go back to the surface. She remembered the burn in her chest as she gasped for air, the water leaving V’s hair several shades darker than usual as he surfaced beside her.

“That was,” she had said, so cold and overwhelmed that she could not find a word that appropriately summarised how she felt.

For one, brief moment, she was seven years old again, climbing out of the swimming pool and into her mother’s arms. She still could not remember her face and it only existed in her imagination as a shadow, but in her mind it did not matter. The seven year old her laughed as her mother wrapped a towel around her body and pinched at her nose and she knew she ought to have been happy-in her mind, she even laughed-but her heart was filled with such an all encompassing sorrow that her eyes brimmed with tears.

This time they fell, dampening her cheeks and blistered lips in the process. Whoever it was that held her hand called her name and her heart swelled like it had when she had been swimming, for she _knew_ them.

She cast her mind back to the look of cool calculation she shared with V as Jumin opened his bag and pulled out a towel.

“The pair of you are going to-”

He had leaned across to reach for them and they both took the chance to drag him into the water. His fall was not so elegant as theirs; casting a tidal wave across the beach and leaving the pair of them laughing as he swam back up.

“Y-y-you,” he had said, gasping at the chill of the water and scowling as V photographed his expression of shock. “You planned that.”

“Of course we did,” Nari had said as V lowered his camera. “We can’t have you missing out on the fun.”

“I think we need to reevaluate your definition of fun.”

“Oh I disagree. I think this is easily the best shot of the day,” said V. “No offense, Nari.”

“None taken.”

She remembered sprinting towards the apartment, Jumin two steps behind her and V lagging at distance, preferring to take pictures of their joined hands and dripping forms than keep up. She remembered the uncomfortable coating of wet sand and seawater that covered their bodies and the three of them crowding in the same bathroom to run a hot bath and help one another out of their ruined clothing.

A terrible idea, in retrospect.

She remembered Jumin’s silence as V fiddled with the fastenings of her dress; his purrs that they had been especially odious and ought to be punished. Somehow, though exactly how she did not remember, Jumin’s idea of a punishment led to her straddling V on the bathroom floor, trailing her tongue across Jumin’s hard cock every time she sank down onto V’s.

V came first and Nari felt it happen. A shudder of warmth deep within her that sent V up into a sitting position and fixing his hands to her waist. Out of the corner of her eye, Nari had spotted Jumin lean over to fetch V’s camera and point it in their general direction.

“Should we tell him?” She had whispered to V as he rolled her over onto her front.

“I think that would be polite,” he said and within a matter of moments they had positioned themselves at Jumin’s feet.

SNAP

Jumin took pictures of the pair of them taking turns to suck at his cock.  

SNAP

“Jumin,” said V.

SNAP.

Jumin took a picture of them locking lips, Nari stroking the inside of his thigh and V giving his cock the same treatment, which left him with no choice but to lean his weight against the bathroom sink.

“Jumin,” said V, louder this time.

“Yes?”

“You have to take the lens cap off first,”

And she remembered that moment of realisation. Of Jumin turning the camera over and over in his hands and her own giggles that only grew more boisterous as he bent her over the sink.

“You know, bad girls don’t get presents,” he had said, “and you’re being especially vexing today.”

“Sweet talker,” she said as he lifted one of her legs up and over his waist and V crawled across to kiss her lips.

She remembered not being nearly so confident as Jumin took that first thrust. Her knees were weak even before V trailed kisses across her throat and headed south across her breasts, down past her hips and-

“Oh, _fuck_!” She had cried out, as Jumin’s thrusts hit a spot deep within her that left her toes curling. Shortly afterwards, V’s lips skimmed over the softness of her stomach and onto her clitoris, and she tossed aside all ideas of coherency.

She had been unable to grasp onto an individual thought then, too.

Perhaps she was still there, lying on the bathroom floor and staring at the ceiling. Perhaps if she opened her eyes they would still be there, limbs entangled. She tightened her grip on the hand clutching hers and opened her eyes again.

The room was still bright, but not so bright that she could not stand to look at it. Instead she took in the closed blinds and open door; the bars on her bed; the pattern on her hospital gown.

V was the one sitting beside her bed and holding onto her hand; the same hand that he smothered in kisses in a display of unrestrained joy when he realized she was awake and looking at him.

_Ah, that’s right._

She remembered the three of them lying on the bathroom floor and her own observation that the bathwater would soon be cold. Jumin had joked about pneumonia and as she climbed in, she laughed about it too, but none of them were laughing when they returned home to three very real cases of the flu.

Dr. Park begged and pleaded for them to rest. They were all on the brink of exhaustion even before their health deteriorated and the doctor had made it very clear that in his honest opinion, that was to blame more than the cold water. In her own small way, Nari had agreed with him.

Where before Jumin would return from work and sulk if there was no one to shower him with affection the moment he walked through the door, more recently he would make a beeline for his home office to pore over the blueprints of the new house. V came and went to his therapist, but while at home he could be found wherever was most comfortable, cleaning his camera equipment, editing his photos, e-mailing contacts or just reading. Of late, though, he and Seven had had a disagreement, which led to him being out of the penthouse more often.

The reunion of Seven and his younger brother shattered most of whatever trust the RFA had in V. The arguments on the messenger lasted long into the night, with topics that carried on for several months. With the complete dissolution of Minteye and Rika’s departure, however, the others were still angry but they seemed to be healing in ways that Seven never had.

Ultimately, everyone was busy and nobody got much time for rest, much less cough medicine or genuine recovery and the fact that her own personal strain of the flu was several times worse than whatever the other two had only served insult to injury. It did not seem to matter that Jumin had conferences all day long or that V had coughed up a lung during therapy; both would drop everything if Nari so much as mentioned a headache.

V let go of her hand at that moment and even though the sudden lack of contact left her feeling rather lost, she was relieved at the prospect of an explanation.

“Jumin’s with the doctor,” said V, in the quiet voice he used when everyone was still on the cusp of sleep. It reminded her of breakfast in bed, of wellington boots on rainy days and other comforting things so strangely opposed to their present situation.

She was reminded, though she did not know why, of swinging her legs over the side of her bed as her mother brushed her hair. She remembered the song on the radio; the warm light shining through the curtains and the gentle tugging of the brush, but no matter how hard she searched her muddled thoughts, she could not find her mother’s face.

She must have looked upset, for V stroked her arm.

“He’s going to come back soon,” he said. “He’ll be so happy to see that you’re awake. You gave us quite a fright.”

_A fright?_

_Yes._

She had been afraid of Seven’s cries the night he broke into the penthouse only a matter of weeks beforehand, all while she stood helplessly in the corner of the room with a bottle of carefully considered pinot noir.

“Have you even _bothered_ to look at him?” He screamed at V, who reached out for his shoulders and urged him to calm down.

She had never seen Seven angry before. Since the wedding, she had not seen him very much at all. She did not know the full extent of everything that had happened, but she knew he had thrown the agency he worked for to the dogs en route to reclaiming his brother. She knew that in the past few months he had devoted his time to his brother’s recovery. She also knew that he barely called anyone and on the occasions that Nari called him, he made very little in the way of sense.

“ _Calm down_?!” He had snapped, only to break out into fits of laughter. “Of course you would say that. You might have had your eyes fixed but you still don’t see.”

“Luciel-”

“All you’ve done is swap one castle for another!”

And in that moment, Nari felt ashamed of the dress Jumin had picked out for her; of the Pinot noir she had carefully chosen and the menu they had examined only a few minutes before.

She remembered a phone call from before her first party and the way that Seven had said, without a moment’s hesitation, that she only cared for Jumin. In truth, the idea that Seven believed she did not care for him frightened her the most of all. In that moment, she could not even convince herself that it was a lie. While Seven and V plotted to bring down Minteye, she had concentrated on her wedding.

She didn’t know when exactly she decided that the next RFA party had to be bigger and better than the last. Perhaps around about the third time Seven’s brother attacked his therapist and Jumin was forced to make alternative arrangements, which left little choice but to push back the planning. Perhaps it was Chief Han’s own brief admission to hospital a month prior to their trip to Jeju. To Jumin’s ire, he had decided on plastic surgery to give him an even more youthful appearance, which put him out of action for only a matter of weeks, but pushed back the party planning even further.

Perhaps it was the sinking feeling of guilt every time a feverish Jumin or V got up the middle of the night to fetch her another blanket or the knowledge that she could not have helped Seven even if she had wanted to. To all intents and purposes, she felt very much like a princess locked away in an ivory tower to comb her hair and stare at her reflection in one looking glass or another.

“V,” she said, her voice a whisper that she barely recognised. “V, I…”

He lifted her hand at that and rested it against his face. Nari was sure she felt tears against the skin.

“Don’t,” he said and she realised then that he was crying, though she didn’t know why. “You don’t have to say anything.”

Nari had seen him cry before; sometimes for almost an hour after 2:15am. This was different, though. It reminded her of something more recent; of a time she walked into the home office at the penthouse in floods of tears herself, all while V and Jumin chatted about which way their new house ought to face. The moment she stepped through the door in tears, however, they abandoned the blueprints.

Following a 3am call from Jumin, Dr. Park seemed to have given up on recommending rest. V and Jumin were better, but if anything, Nari was getting worse. When Jumin called, it was to demand an explanation for why she kept being sick.

“You _are_ a doctor, are you not?” She remembered him growling down the phone and pacing the perimeter of the room as she laid her head in V’s lap.

“You okay?” V had said, stroking her back and shoulders, to which she had smirked.

“The last time we were all in a bathroom together, it was a lot more fun.”

Humour aside, the next day Dr. Park tested her for everything and she remembered that the results were what sent her into Jumin’s home study in tears.

“What is it?” Jumin had said, grabbing her shoulders and seeming to prepare himself for the worst. “Your results, did they come back?”

At the time, she couldn’t explain her tears, but she had been sobbing ever since she got the news, leaving Dr. Park to tap her shoulder politely and Driver Kim to stroke her hair as she got into the car.

“He says we’re going to have a baby,” she said.

All she could think about was the house that was not built yet. The hours of therapy and reparations that took up so much of V’s time. It was another burden and that was not even the worst to come.

“I don’t know which of you is the father.”

The fact that they weren’t in the least bit angry with her only made it worse. She spent hours sobbing into V’s chest, all while Jumin stroked her hair and told her it was going to be alright. Later she laughed about it and said that her tears were because of hormones, but she knew for a fact that it was guilt.

Guilt at being a burden and almost completely useless.

Guilt at her morning sickness pushing her behind in her party planning.

Guilt at her own mixed feelings about being pregnant in the first place, all while Jumin and V were ecstatic in their own ways.

V wanted to document her growing stomach, regardless of how it did not seem to be changing at all.

“But there’s nothing there,” she had told him as they sat in the bathtub. “Look.”

She ran her hands over her stomach and he slipped his over hers.

“Not now, maybe,” he had said. “But soon we’ll have to roll you everywhere.”

“You wouldn’t _dare_ ,” she said and then, smiling smugly. “Jumin would never let you.”

“He would if I told him it was more aerodynamically efficient.”

His hands had still been on her stomach and she turned to him, meaning to make another joke, only to spot that there were tears in his eyes.

“Jihyun,” she said. “I-”

“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” he had said. “It’s just…when I was a boy, all I ever wanted was a family and now-” he laughed at his own sentimentality- “I guess I finally get to have one.”

The anesthesia was wearing off and Nari’s thoughts were clearing. As she watched V grip onto her hand, she knew she was running out of places to hide. The truth was hidden in her thoughts and memories and would not wait forever.

Nari recalled that one month after their trip to Jeju, she and Jumin had celebrated their first wedding anniversary. They had reservations at a top tier restaurant and Nari made the mistake of leaning back on the bed as she attempted to untangle her necklace. The bed was warm and inviting and she had closed her eyes

- _just for minute_

-only to be swallowed whole by a wave of fatigue that she did not bother to fight.

Jumin had been perplexed by the sight of her stretched out across the bed and at first he thought there was something wrong.

“Nari, are you feeling unwell?”

“No,” she had said, waving her hand to gesture at the clock. “I’ll be up in a minute.”

“The car is outside,” he had said. “Would you like more time?”

“I…no,” she pushed herself into a sitting position. “I’m coming…just give me a…”

He had already left the room, however and Nari climbed up off the bed to slip on her shoes and chase after him. She knew he would not be angry; the maître d’ would find them a different table at a moment’s notice without referencing their lateness. Still, she did not relish the thought of being a burden in some other small, subtle way.

It came as something of a surprise that when he reappeared he was holding a bottle of wine in one hand and a tub of ice cream in the other.

“This is for me,” he had said, cradling the wine under one arm. “And this,” he held out the ice cream, “is for you.”

She remembered accepting the ice cream and staring at the label; the same label that Jumin had recited to Dr. Park on more than one occasion for fear that it might harm her.

“What about the restaurant? Our reservation?”

And at that he had kissed her forehead, in the same soft way that he did before bed.

“You are my princess,” he said, “but more importantly, you are my wife. What manner of husband would I be if I dragged you out to dinner when you are so tired that you can barely keep your eyes open?”

And so they spent their anniversary in bed, spending far longer in each other’s undivided company than they had for several months.

That night was the first that he touched her stomach. Up until that point, V had been unable to stop doing so and commenting that soon there would be kicks, but Jumin never had. Nari supposed she understood-it was illogical to feel attachment to an abstract idea and Jumin was nothing if not logical- though her heart skipped a beat that first time he rested his head against her waist.

“I almost told my father today,” he had said, all while Nari ran her fingers through his hair.

“You did?”

“Yes. He took me for lunch and asked after your health.”

Nari’s relationship with Chief Han had always been on the awkward side, especially considering the circumstances of their first meeting. Even so, they had reached an unspoken understanding to each pretend they did not remember the actions of the other, leaving Nari to smile and nod and accept his every compliment with as much grace as she could muster. Even so, he had made one thing very clear at every dinner she attended; he expected grandchildren and soon and, though he was too polite to say so with her present, grew increasingly impatient with each passing day.

Nari understood that he viewed grandchildren as his legacy and wanted to hold the heirs to his fortune in his arms, but he did not- _could not_ \- know about V.  He did not understand that there were reasons they had held back.

“And you didn’t tell him?” She had said, unable to hide her surprise.

“No,” said Jumin, running a hand over her nonexistent bump and back across so that it rested beside his face. “I wanted this to remain… _ours_ for now.”

It was a sentiment that she had not expected from him, almost as unexpected as the way he took to trailing his hand from her hip to her stomach as he kissed her goodbye in a morning. As she grew that bit larger, he sometimes stopped to observe the fact with a small smile on his face.

A few weeks later, they still had not made any announcement, though not for lack of excitement. The RFA party was already overdue.

She was sure that she was going to remember the events of the past few hours for the rest of her life, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to remember happy things, like her mother’s deliberately awful singing voice and watching cartoons at the breakfast table but only the ugly thoughts remained.

Only a pang of discomfort after breakfast that she ignored until she realized she had started to bleed. Only the fact that she had never had cause to call Dr. Park before and had entered his number into her phone reluctantly, joking that Jumin called him quite often enough for everyone. Even so, her first instinct was to dial his number with shaking hands.

In the time it took for him to answer, however, she had already ended the call. Already tossed aside her phone. She knew then that her tears were ones of guilt; there was no use denying it as she dragged off her clothes and sobbed in the shower, watching the hopes and dreams of everyone around her quite literally pour down the drain.

In her wildest dreams she would never have imagined there would be so much blood and as she switched on the water, she had wondered how she was going to tell them. Every time she thought about it, she had remembered V’s tears in the bathtub and Jumin’s subtle defiance and all she wanted was to hold onto that reality for a moment longer.

She remembered sinking down onto the tiles, remembered the sting of the water against her face…and remembered laughing despairingly at the realisation that Elizabeth 3rd had positioned herself on the bathroom counter and had been yowling for the past ten minutes for someone to feed her.

Nari waited for the bleeding to slow before turning off the water and towelling herself off, wanting nothing more than to go to bed. Maybe when she woke up it would all be a dream and she could carry on as if nothing had happened.

She didn’t go to bed, though. After feeding Elizabeth, she went into Jumin’s office, locked the door and curled up at the desk in the hopes of responding to emails. She could not stand the thought of her party being anything less than perfect. There had to be way in which she could still be useful. She could still answer messages and double check the guest list.

At some point, though she did not know when, she convinced herself that it was the party at the forefront of her mind and not the idea that she might once again be a burden on all she had loved. When she thought of the party, she did not have to think of the blood.

It was harder to redirect her own thoughts when the pain began. A deep, intense pain at the center of her being that refused to be ignored. It left her curling up in a sobbing heap on the floor, clutching at the desk and honestly starting to believe that she was about to die.

And all of the while, she was still bleeding. Slowly at first, but not for long. She honestly did not know how many pads she soaked through in the end before heading back into the sitting room in search of her phone, but she did know that she tripped over Elizabeth en route, who happened to be sitting outside of the bathroom door.

“What is it?” She said, more than a little woozy. “I’ve fed you already.”

Elizabeth yowled and the pain broke out again, leaving Nari to double over into the nearest wall and groan, wrapping both arms around her waist.

She had staggered into the sitting room in search of her phone, only to realise that she no longer remembered where it had landed. She crossed the room to reach for the one on the coffee table instead, feeling faint and more than a little bit frightened.

Jumin’s number was the first on the list and she dialed that one first, unsure whether to be grateful or not when the call went straight through to voicemail. She did not want to tell him what was happening, but at the same time she wanted him to stroke her hair and tell her she would be okay.

V didn’t answer either, although that came as far less of a shock. He had therapy that morning and meetings that afternoon and had gotten into the habit of switching his phone off for most of the day.

Nari dialed Jumin’s desk phone again, willing him to answer and to ignore it in equal measure. When he did answer, she genuinely cried.

“Jumin!” She sobbed by way of greeting.

“I…kitten?”

At her feet, Elizabeth yowled.

“Jumin,” she had said, “something's…”

She never got the chance to tell him that something was wrong. The phone hit the ground with a clatter and so did she. Everything went black, but before she closed her eyes, she remembered Jumin calling her name through the phone receiver and Elizabeth pawing at her face.

She dreamed of Jeju; of her mother chasing her across the beach.

“A shell for you,” she had said in her dreams, never quite understanding how it was she could not make out her mother’s face but knew she was crying.

She opened her eyes only twice afterwards and on both occasions her thoughts were jumbled. She remembered Dr. Park leaning over her and reassuring her that she was going to be all right. She remembered voices-so many and all at once- and that one singular moment she picked out Jumin’s.

“How was this allowed to happen?!”

“Mr Han, I-”

“Do not ‘Mr Han’ me. Explain yourselves!”

She remembered the moment she fell into a dreamless sleep interrupted only by memories of Jeju. Of holding hands with her mother and sitting side by side on the deck of the cabin.

In her dreams, she had a moment of clarity and understood everything that she came to protect herself from later. It had never been her own mother she dreamed of, but her own child. A child whose eyes were sometimes grey and sometimes blue and dipped their toes in the ocean in the darkest corners of her imagination.

A child she had not realised quite how much she actually wanted until it was gone.

 


	2. Chapter 2

She was lucid when Jumin returned to her room with Dr. Park. Lucid enough that it did not escape her notice how haggard they both looked. **  
**

“-I refuse to believe there was nothing further that could have been done,” said Jumin. “I want a second opinion.”

“I am your second opinion, Mr Han,” said Dr. Park, his words patient where his tone was decidedly not. “And any other medical practitioner worth their salt will tell you the same thing. I am deeply sorry for your loss, but when taking the hemorrhaging into account, we could have been facing a far more dire situation than we are now. Please be reassured by that fact alone.”

Jumin stood at the foot of her bed and ran his fingers through his hair to massage his temples; a sure sign of a headache and immediately Nari wished she hadn't noticed.

For one brief moment, Jumin glanced in her direction, fingers still entangled in his hair. Her free hand was heavy, but she reached for him automatically, willing him to come closer so that she could rub his temples or comfort him in some, small way. Those were her reasons, or so she told herself. She knew the truth was a good deal more selfish.

“I would like to see the results,” he said, turning back to Dr. Park as if he had not seen her at all. She understood his reasons, of course. He needed someone to blame, but only she could claim fault.

She still reached for him as he left the room, that same hand she had stretched out him left palm up against the sheets. V’s response was almost predictably immediate.

“He'll be back soon,” he said. “He cancelled all of his meetings for the day.”

He said it to reassure her, though it had the opposite effect, for once again she remembered the house that was not built yet; the hours of therapy and reparations that took up so much of V’s time. More specifically, she remembered why she had not wanted to tell Jumin and V about what was happening in the first place. Once again they had dropped everything to come to her side and this time she did not deserve it in the slightest.

Before she knew it, she was crying again, using the hand she had extended for Jumin to shield her face.

“Nari,” said V, his reaction one of panic. “I-”

He jumped out of the chair as his kindness only prompted her to sob harder.

“I'll go and get him,” he said, stroking her arm. “He’ll come, you'll see. He'll come right away.”

Whether he meant to or not, he was using the same voice he used when recovering from nightmares. She knew she had frightened him and took a deep breath as she wiped her eyes.

“No,” she said. “Don't fetch him. I don't...I'll be alright.”

She sounded about as convincing as V did, however.

 

* * *

 

In the end Jumin did not come back into her room and when Dr. Park came back, it was to announce that he had left the hospital entirely.

“Now Mrs Han,” said Dr. Park, “you did lose a lot of blood and with that in mind, I think it would be for the best if we kept you here tonight.”

“I will stay with you,” said V, squeezing her hand.

“No,” she said.

“Mrs Han, if an emergency occurs-”

“No, I understand that,” she said, before turning to V. “You should go. You have important things to do and…”

“Nari-”

She couldn't stand the idea of him lingering in a hospital for her benefit and shook her head.

“No,” she said, smiling a wide, fake smile. “I'll be fine.”

“Nari...”

“Jihyun! Please…”

When he first asked her to call him by his name, it had been as a gesture of intimacy. She was so used to calling him by his professional name that using his real one felt very similar to running her fingers across his body. Over time, though, she had come to use his name outside of the bedroom when speaking as his lover and as was to be expected, the contexts varied. Sometimes she was feeding him cake and other times she was reaching for his hand and asking about his wellbeing. She rarely called him by his name in public, where others might see, and definitely never had in front of Dr. Park.

She did not know the impact she meant to have, only that the point would reach Jihyun where it had not V. The moment the words left her lips, however, she regretted them.

 

* * *

 

He left. Of course he did.

Nari didn't know why she was surprised, nor why she glimpsed across at the door to her room any time she heard footsteps. She did not know why she moved to sit up when Dr. Park entered the room to check her vitals, nor why she glanced behind him in the hopes someone might be standing there. She didn’t know why she was disappointed when a bag of clothes arrived in place of Jumin or Jihyun, for in retrospect, she should not have been surprised. She had caused a mess. She had ruined everything and it was only fair that they leave her to consider her mistake, however anomalous.

Even so, she found that she had expected otherwise and that alone hurt her in ways she had not predicted.

She did not dream that night. Ironic she supposed, considering how long she had spent dreaming of far off places. She allowed herself to fall asleep, in fact, after spending hours of steady bargaining and counting the tiles on the ceiling. She decided that maybe if she closed her eyes, she would find herself back at the shore, with the sea surrounding her. Perhaps if she slept for long enough, she might return to a place where nothing had gone wrong and she was not entirely useless to everyone.

And even though she woke from dreamless sleep tired and lonely, she smiled broadly at Dr. Park and every nurse that came into her little room.

“I’m perfectly alright,” she made a point to say more than once. “As a matter of fact, I think I’d like to go home.”

If she went home, she could continue plotting the party. She could try and piece together everything that she had broken. Perhaps she had not ruined everything after all.

Dr. Park was firm. He arrived on his morning rounds with a sympathetic smile and a couple of snacks, ready for conversation as if they were friends and she had not seen him snap at her husband only the day before. Nari remained motionless in the covers as he sat down beside her and offered her a biscuit as one might a scared child instead of a mostly useless adult.

“I know that things are hard at the moment,” he said, shaking his head. “But if medicine has taught me anything, it’s that the body is remarkable and people are too. I don’t know why this happened-“

“I do,” said Nari.

“I…”

She remembered the beach. The child with eyes of blue and sometimes grey. The child she had wanted with every core of her being.

“It was my fault,” she said, without a hint of doubt. “There was something more I could have done. I could have been more careful. I could have been safer, I-“

“Mrs Han, sometimes these things just-“

“NO!”

She screamed it so loudly and so suddenly that a nurse passing outside started from the shock. Nari sighed and buried her face in her hands.

“I should have been happier,” she said, and then, smoothing her fingers through her hair. “I want to leave.”

The realisation that even in her despair she was useless hit her like a punch to the gut. She needed to go home and do something productive. She needed to be out of the hospital.

“Mrs Han, you are still-“

“I won’t ask again,” she snapped.

Dr. Park agreed only on the presumption that Jumin would disagree. Nari was only too happy to prove him wrong, snatching up her phone and dialling the number of Jumin’s desk phone, waiting to hear his voice and steeling herself for his questions of concern.

She could not think of anything worse than crumbling over the phone and yet she wanted to. She needed him to talk her through each one of her broken pieces if she was to make a start at rebuilding.

When he did answer though, her every precaution proved unnecessary, for she all but melted into a sobbing mess, lowering herself onto the bed and gripping her phone with a shaking hand.

“Jumin,” she said, eyes suddenly hot with tears. “I-“

“I’m in a meeting,” he said. “I’ll call you later.”

He hung up before she could say anything more and Nari stared at his name on her phone screen. She knew she didn’t deserve it, but she had wanted him to say something. The fact that he did not dignify her with even that left her imagination wandering in places she did not wish it to go.

Afterwards, she lingered over V’s name in her contacts, remembering her final rejection all the more. Suddenly, she remembered the way he had stroked her arm all the more clearly; the intonation of his panicked voice echoing in her memory.

She did not want to ask him any favours. She knew she had probably lost that right.

She sent him only one message in the end, dismissing the idea that he would read it, much less act.

**_I’d like to come home today. – Nari_ **

* * *

 

Less than an hour later, Driver Kim arrived to take her home. In that time, V had not responded to her message and Nari mostly assumed he did not intend to. Whatever his reasons, however, she could not deny that Driver Kim was a welcome face.

Dr. Park seemed to share her sentiments, for as he welcomed Driver Kim into the room, it was with the enthusiasm of an old friend. As Dr Park filled out a prescription slip, they chatted pleasantly about a rainstorm that had happened overnight and Nari stared into space, feeling as if their voices were ones that resonated through empty chambers and open doors and not real ones she ought to be paying attention to.

She must have looked confused when Dr. Park finished signing the prescription slip, for when he passed it to her, he squeezed her shoulder and told her without a moment’s hesitation that she was going to be fine.

Nari wondered about that as she sat down in the back of the car.

_A shell for you_

But her hands were empty.

 

* * *

 

Nari remembered only vague details of the apartment she had left behind. She remembered crashing into the coffee table and sobbing in the shower, but when she returned it was as if she had not been there for several months. There was unopened mail and a fresh newspaper at the breakfast table and she took a seat, disorientated.

On busier mornings, they left the cups for the maid, Nari dragging on her jacket and fastening her shoes in the car even knowing how much it irritated Jumin.

“We would have waited for you,” he had said at least once, sighing as Driver Kim started the ignition and she was propelled forward, banging her head against the front seats. “You could have taken your time.”

But she was stubborn about it, double checking her makeup even as V stroked the sore spot on her head.

On this occasion, though, the breakfast table sat readily prepared for a breakfast that had never arrived; the cups untouched, the newspaper perfectly perpendicular to Jumin’s seat in the manner of his preference. Nari would check the messenger in much the same fashion that he skimmed one think piece or another, but on this occasion she lifted the newspaper herself, touching the corner of each page for a sign that it might have been read.

She didn’t know what excuse or lie Jumin had given on her behalf. They had not formally announced a pregnancy and referencing it only in the context of a lost one seemed unnecessary. She told herself that it was better that way; that she could not stumble over a lie she did not know and the less she thought about the rest of the RFA left ignorant, the easier it was on her conscience.

At the very least Elizabeth seemed to harbor mixed feelings about her prolonged absence. As Nari lowered the paper, she spotted her peering out from beneath the coffee table and remembered Jumin’s voice as she finally got through to his desk phone.

She had wanted to hear his voice before, but in that moment Nari thought she preferred it that she couldn’t hear him.

 

* * *

 

When Nari entered the master bedroom, it was empty, though she did not know why she was sorry about the fact.

She had grown up in an apartment much emptier than that one, oftentimes returning home from school to no one at all and the sheer number of rooms in Jumin’s penthouse had always been a little too extensive for her tastes if she was entirely honest.

During her first week of party planning, she had considered the messenger a luxury and spent rather more time checking in on the RFA than was probably necessary; indulging in an old desire for company. When no one was online, she often found herself exploring the empty rooms; not out of any desire to snoop, but more out of a genuine need for a sign of Jumin where she could not find him in person.

After her return from the hospital, she did something quite similar: trailing her fingers along the kitchen counter and opening up the door to the study as if she had never before been inside. Ill thought out, perhaps, because it was impossible to miss the blueprints Jumin had left across his desk. That same desk where she had found him only a matter of days earlier, poring over ceramics. The same desk where she had tried and failed to keep everything together.

She approached the blueprints without paying attention to the numbers, running her fingers over her stomach as Jumin had once; the way that had taken her so immeasurably by surprise. She wondered exactly how long it had taken him to return to plotting floor plans now that their world was so immeasurably shaken.

She had planned to to continue in her correspondences with party guests, but in that moment all she wanted to do was sleep. Before long, she lingered in the doorway of the master bedroom, staring at the perfectly arranged bedclothes and wondering why exactly it was that she did not feel welcome.

Instead she grabbed a few sets of clothes and retreated to the nearest guest bedroom. It once belonged to V, but had remained empty ever since he moved into the master bedroom with the both of them and compared to the combined belongings of three individuals, looked like a jail cell. Nari laid her things on a nearby chair and sat on the bed, glancing across at the potpourri on the dresser before flopping backwards to stare at the ceiling.

She did not plan to sleep. She did not plan to do anything.

Perhaps she might not have done were it not for Elizabeth pawing at the closed door and mewling sadly. She did not crave nearly so much attention when Jumin was out; waiting for him to return before emerging from her hiding place and climbing up his legs or onto the head of whomever he embraced. Nari concluded she was probably hungry and sighed before rising from the bed.

The moment she opened the door, however, Elizabeth took two steps backwards and stared at her, before rolling over onto her back and chirruping as if it ought to have been obvious that that had been her plan all along.

Nari sighed and pointed to the bedroom.

"Did you want to come in or not?"

Elizabeth did not move and Nari shook her head, leaving the door ajar as she retreated to the bed.

"Fine," she said, curling in a heap against the pillows. "I won't force you."

 

* * *

 

She did not remember falling asleep, but when she woke up, someone had draped a blanket over her and Elizabeth had crawled onto the pillow beside her. Nari's stirring earned a mewl and an obstinate paw to the face.

She did not know how long exactly she had been sleeping, but whoever had arranged the blanket over her had closed the door behind them. She sat up slowly and reached for her phone to check the time, feeling somewhat startled when she realised two full hours had passed without her notice.

She stretched and left for the kitchen, opening the bedroom door with the blanket still draped around her shoulders.

She had expected to find the penthouse in much the same state she had left it, but the reality was quite different. A some stage, V had returned from either therapy or the gallery and Nari moved to greet him, only to freeze on the spot.

He had not noticed her yet and, from the look of it, he was packing. When he turned around and saw her standing there, it was difficult to know who was more surprised about the sudden turn of events.

Jihyun didn’t do sheepish. It was one of the things Nari adored about him, in fact. After lovemaking, he would sometimes wander the room entirely naked, in no rush at all to grab his clothes. The prospect of being interrupted, if anything, only seemed to encourage him further. But as he stood there, a folded sweater in his hands, examining the neatly folded clothes and books in his rucksack, ‘sheepish’ was perhaps the only accurate description.

“I...ah…” Jihyun waved his hand around the room as if trying to think of something -anything- to explain away how it looked, all while rain lashed against the windows. “There’s a good reason for this.”

Nari dropped the blanket from her shoulders to the ground and closed the bedroom door.

“Are you...leaving?”

“You're home already…” Jihyun paused. “I didn't think they would actually discharge you so early. I'm so sorry.”

“I got out early,” said Nari. “Apparently for the better.”

Jihyun sighed and leaned his weight against a chair, half folded dress shirt in his arms. Nari stepped forward and placed a hand on his shoulder.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Are you leaving? Don’t...”

She couldn’t believe what she was about to ask.

“Is this because of what I said?”

She wanted to tell him that in her dreams they had dived into the ocean. That she remembered the chill of the ocean against her chest with just as much clarity as his lips on hers. But in the end the words stuck in her throat and her eyes welled with tears.

“No,” he said. “You've done nothing wrong.”

And in that moment, she was reminded of another evening.

The evening that she chose her wedding dress, she had been overjoyed and bounced on her heels outside of Jumin’s home office, waiting for him to get off the phone so that she could tell him the news. She was less excited, however, when she noticed he gripped the desk with one hand and the phone with the other, both white knuckled and trembling.

“Jihyun listen to me,” he had muttered into the phone, “there is nothing more you could have done.”

Later she discovered the truth of it. That V had called him from the Mint Eye base after an infiltration attempt with Seven went horribly wrong. Rika was alive, though she lay bleeding in his arms and, while he had initially called to ask for medical assistance, in the end all he had done was sob down the phone.

He still loved her. The part of him that screamed into the void at 2:15am would probably always love her. Even though she survived and was later sent away to a psychiatric facility during the investigation of the Mint Eye affair, V was very much convinced at the time that she lay there dying.

“Jihyun,” she said, “about yesterday…”

She realised that in all of the time he had been packing his bag he had not once looked across where she had fallen by the coffee table, sometimes going so far as to avert his gaze completely.

She wanted to ask if she was the only one reminded of that evening, though had the worst feeling that the answer was already clear as day.

In the end, however, she went with something simpler.

“When will you be home?”


	3. Chapter 3

After he left, she sank to the floor; sobbing silently and balling her fists.

There was too much to process. Too much had happened.

* * *

 

If she squeezed her eyes shut, she wondered if perhaps he might come back and everything would return to how it was before. She could go to breakfast at the immaculately arranged table and sip her water and ask Jumin about whatever project Chief Han had so rudely cast in his path, all while V argued with Elizabeth over their favourite chair.

No matter how long she stayed there, however, the door remained shut and nobody walked through it. In an attempt to pull herself together, she wiped her tears and sat right up, though her blood ran cold when she realised that she had come to sit down in approximately the same spot by the coffee table where she had fallen. She had moved without thinking, without looking beyond the door to the penthouse and she found herself tracing her fingers along the rug, shuddering when she realised that it seemed to have been replaced in her absence.

At the opposite corner of the table, there was a framed picture from her wedding day that demonstrated her bathed in a golden light and laughing at a particular joke that she no longer remembered.

Nari had seen that picture a thousand times at least. As she sipped at her coffee or ate her breakfast, she would glance across at it and smile to herself. This time around though, it made her furious. It reminded her of the occasion that Seven stopped by with words that were not even meant for her.

The woman in that photograph knew nothing of suffering. She was safe inside of a photograph where no one could leave and nothing would change and seeing her laugh so unreservedly left Nari feeling as if she were the subject of a joke.

She grabbed the photo by the frame and tossed it right across the room, so forcefully that it hit a painting before shattering on the ground.

The painting had been a gift from Jumin’s father: a minimalist print by a European painter that Chief Han picked up some years ago as a housewarming gift. She got to her feet and approached it slowly, knowing she would have to clear up the glass but at the same time not particularly wanting to assess the damage. It was a valuable piece, even if Jumin was not particularly fond of it. Two years ago, she and Jumin had crashed shoulder blades against that very same painting, she realised. The first night they had spent together. The beginning of everything.

And in truth, until that moment, she was sure she had not truly understood her own state of unreality. With the exception of the broken picture frame, the apartment lay completely unchanged as if frozen in time only moments before a disaster. From her own perspective, the world had been taken by the root and utterly shattered to its core, yet everywhere she looked, the world continued without notice. She remembered the pain and the blood perfectly well, yet there was no scar left upon her skin; no acknowledgment that any of it was real.

Even in the apartment, she could not make out a single stain. Everything was the same except for her.

Somewhat thankfully, the painting remained intact, even if the frame of her own picture lay in pieces. As she knelt down to slip the picture from what remained of the frame and cleared the glass away, Nari remembered rose scented bathwater and her own laughter at the idea that she was shivering.

She might have left the hospital, but she had not really come home.

In the two years since her arrival at the RFA, Nari had been in touch with her parents only for the formalities at her wedding. In truth, it was rare that they were on her mind at all and they had been far more opinionated about her employment status than they were of Jumin.

As a teenager, Nari Song was the envy of most other girls her age. Her parents worked long hours at two of the largest corporations in the country and so she could always count on food on the table and a warm bed to sleep in. However, as a consequence, they were rarely home and more than once she had wondered if they could pick her out of a crowd.

That first evening after returning from the hospital, she found that she thought about them quite a lot.

After taking the photograph from its frame and clearing away the glass, she took a shower and changed into a different set of clothes, ready to organise dinner for when Jumin returned home. Ordinarily, Nari and V would arrive home before Jumin and wait for his return (or apologetic phonecall) before coming to any conclusions, but when taking into account the fact that she had not seen him to talk to for what felt like such a long time and she did not know how much he knew of V’s departure, she wanted as much organised in advance as possible.

But Jumin did not come home, not even after multiple phone calls, e-mails and voicemail messages to let him know of her arrangements.

Nari stared across at his empty seat as she called his desk phone and was subsequently rerouted to Jaehee.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “It seems we’re pulling an all-nighter on this project of Chief Han’s. I’m not sure why, since at this stage it’s largely complete.”

The project she referred to, of course, was the one Chief Han passed on at Jeju and Nari laughed even though she was numb.

After hanging up the phone, she waited for a couple of minutes before dialing V’s number. He had not told her where it was that he planned to go, nor had he packed a tremendous amount, implying that wherever it was he had gone, he did not mean to stay for very long. Even so, she remembered the threadbare cardigan that he had been wearing the first time she ever met him and his own admissions over drinks that during his college years he owned very few clothes and had never quite gotten out of that mindset.

Perhaps he did not intend to come back for some time, after all. She could not say that she blamed him and in the end he did not answer the phone, which left her imagination to wander freely for better or worse.

She took in the silent apartment for a grand total of five minutes before calling her mother’s number, the memory of other silent apartments and other immaculately empty dinner tables lurking at the back of her mind like a fingerprint on one of Jihyun’s camera lenses. She did not want to think about the emptiness of her childhood, after all, but the moment it came to mind the harder it was to avoid doing so.

She supposed it ought to have come as a comfort that nobody answered that phone either. She did not have to stumble over words she might have said in a more efficient manner. Even so, she found herself thinking about her mother’s voicemail message even as she rose from the table and reached for her coat.

Urgent enquiries after the tone.

* * *

 

The first time Nari visited C&R, it was as a visitor from an outside company. She remembered ironing her business jacket twice and changing her mind about her shoes once, twice and then a third time before heading out of the door. Even with her hours of preparation, she arrived at the building with the conclusion that she was out of her depth; she regretted everything as she handed over her name.

For all of her hours of preparation and months of deadlines, ultimately it ended in failure. Jumin Han cancelled their meeting in favour of pursuing a different contract with an a rival company. As it was, they never met and instead Nari waited in the reception area until the softly spoken woman at the desk received an urgent call from Assistant Kang. It was only as she waited for the lift that she learned both of C&R’s new direction and her imminent unemployment.

At the time, she was angry. She knew nothing of Jumin Han but she was sure she hated him and as she got into the lift, she sobbed tears of frustration. She did not even try to bother and calm herself down as a stranger got in at one of the lower floors and reached into his jacket pocket somewhat automatically for a handkerchief.

“Are you alright, Miss?”

At the mention of Jumin Han, he let her know that she could keep it.

It was well over two years ago, yet it remained fresh in her memory as she stood outside of his office with a keycard in her hand. She had been standing there for the better part of ten minutes, wondering if she ought to knock and what might greet her on the other side.

A short while prior to their trip to Jeju, she had crept into his office with a cake. At the time, he had been sitting at his desk and motioned for her to come over as he chatted to a business partner on the phone.

“Once the proper footnotes are amended to my approval, it shall be mailed out for your inspection. As I mentioned via e-mail correspondence, there are several to consider.”

His voice remained level even as he turned in his chair and extended an arm, shifting his weight and holding the phone to the opposite ear as she sat down in his lap. He had stroked his hand along her back as he continued the phone conversation, every so often glancing from the paperwork in front of him to the cake.

Nari had spent the day in meetings, settling into her role as the party planner and approaching businesses on behalf of the RFA. Some needed more convincing than others, especially when considering the events of the previous year. Most days she would return home with aching feet and examine her itinerary with an expression of remorse, knowing that the new party needed to be perfect, but wondering when exactly she could squeeze in an afternoon coffee or even a nap.

That day, she had gone to visit the owner of a local patisserie, who remained one of the only potential guests to show much in the way of enthusiasm at meeting with her. The owner had taken her around one of their sites, introduced her to their staff and even gone so far as to gift her a tuxedo cake as a sample.

Nari spent much of the car ride to C&R with it on her lap, examining each one of its layers in much the same manner that Jumin did in that moment.

She remembered how he hung up the phone and sank back in his chair.

“It’s good to see you,” he said, with a soft kiss to her forehead. “How was your day?”

“Open wide.”

He had blinked. Examined the forkful of cake she offered and smiled softly before complying, closing his eyes as she touched the fork to his lips.

He kept his eyes shut for several seconds, in the manner Nari knew from when he tested wines.

“It’s light,” he had said in the end. “Moist. Overly sweet for my tastes, though I imagine it is a popular choice nonetheless.”

He paused then and noticed she was smiling at him. In response, he leaned forward so his lips grazed hers, leaving smudged cake glaze and crumbs woven in her lipstick.

“Did you come here with cake to seduce me?” He breathed into her kisses.

“Would you like me to?”

It would be erroneous to suggest they had never considered having sex in an office. As a matter of fact, it was one of the first conversations they ever had, before she and Jumin knew one another’s levels of comfort and C&R featured so prominently in the framework of everyone’s lives that it was an obvious place to start.

As it was, Jumin was conservative enough that the prospect of blurring the lines between his professional and intimate lives did not leave him comfortable in the slightest. He was happy to fool around in his home office, but if ever anyone suggested they move the action to his office in the C&R building, he would refuse point blank.

That day was no exception: he ran his fingertips along the hem of Nari’s skirt and across to her knee before reaching to take the fork from her hand.

“Later,” he had said, cutting a careful sliver of cake with the side of the fork.

And as she stood at the door on that afternoon, it did not skip her notice that this time around she had nothing to give him.

Before taking the lift, Nari had taken a moment at the front desk to ask if Jumin was in his office. She did not care to explain that every number she had for him had continued through to voicemail and he still had not answered any of her e-mails, but in any case, the receptionist confirmed all of her worst suspicions: that he was at his desk, that he had been all day and she could call him if Nari so desired, implying at the very least that he was deliberately ignoring her calls.

On the way up, she had tried not to think too much of it and gotten so far as to convince herself it was all mere happenstance, though that soon changed as she hovered in the doorway, knowing within an instant that something was wrong. It was never normally so quiet nor so dark: there was always a phone call somewhere; a printer humming; a pen scratching against paper. Right then, though, the only noise came from her shoes against the carpet and with the exception of the evening glow of the city through the blinds on the opposite side of the room, it was almost entirely dark.

“Jumin?” She said, reaching for a light switch and squinting as they flickered on overhead.

A long time ago, a lifetime it seemed, Nari lingered two steps behind Jaehee and Jumin on her first tour of C&R. At the time it had seemed almost wrong to be there in her ordinary clothes, exploring hallways she had once practiced walking with flashcards and pretend handshakes. At any moment she was sure the floor would dissolve beneath her shoes and someone would realise that she was not meant to be there. Surely someone would know that she was the woman from a nameless company sent away without so much as a meeting.

Among other things, she had practised an entire presentation for her meeting with Jumin Han, ready for an appointment in the C&R conference room that ultimately never came. She had imagined it to smell of vinyl and other synthetic materials; as if in stark contrast to the musty room of her own, smaller company. She did not know if to feel satisfied or not when she took in the fact that in reality it appeared both brand new and freshly painted, confirming almost every suspicion she had ever had about it. At the time, her attentions drifted from the tour and across to pick out whichever seat she might have taken in her meeting, had she ever gotten the chance.

As such, she remembered only the slightest details.

“On good days,” she remembered him saying as he wrapped his arm around her shoulders, “this room is the powerhouse of C&R. Our influence stretches across the globe, but ultimately, all that we are…our direction…our brand. All of that comes from this room.”

“And on bad days?”

The words that came afterwards were meaningless at the time, but sickened her to her stomach as the lights came on.

At first glance, his desk appeared normal, without a single hint of disarray. Nari could see even from the opposite end of the room that his paperwork had been neatly organised and slotted into its regular tray for the mail room clerk to pick up on rounds. Each one of the photographs that he had decided to keep at work remained in the same positions that he had so carefully chosen and cheerfully described. He had turned his chair towards the window and, although she could see the back of his head over the top, that too was hardly out of the ordinary. More than once she had arrived and discovered him in some variety of deep thought.

It was the whiskey that caught her eye. Macallan 1926, with an innocuous yellow label and astronomical price tag.

Whiskey. For bad days.

“You should be resting,” he said without looking and almost instantaneously she ached from his absence. She missed the ghost of his lips against her forehead and the warmth of his breath inches from her ear. He sat only a matter of feet away from her and, peculiar as it sounded, it almost seemed that he had never been so far away.

“I missed you.”

He was the one to say it before, back when she had teetered on the edge of paranoia, convinced that it was the end of all things. Back when her biggest fear was being dismissed a second time and wandering the dance floor as numbly as she had once wandered the subway, newly unemployed.  This time around, though, he said nothing.

Nari took two slow steps towards the desk, watching as he set aside his empty glass.

“I will call for Driver Kim to pick you up,” he said, as if she were a client he did not particularly care for and wished to be rid of as soon as possible. Indeed, when he finally turned his chair away from the window, he avoided all eye contact and instead reached right for the phone.

Not for the first time, Nari found herself watching in an unblinking fashion, each word dying before it crossed her lips. She wanted to beg and plead, to reason and demand and say so many things that did not make an ounce of sense and she wondered if she even had the right to. Perhaps, given everything that had happened in the past few days, Jumin would no longer wish to hear her speak of how much he meant to her. In the hospital he had not even wished to touch her and she was not entirely sure if she wanted to know the reason why.

Then, more than ever, she found herself thinking of how shyly he had rested his hand against her stomach only a matter of weeks ago.

When she finally spoke, her voice wavered.

“Are you coming home?”

_Are you coming back to me?_

He did not respond at first and she wondered if he had even heard her question, much less meant to acknowledge it, but then he got to his feet.

“Jumin,” she said, watching as he crossed the room, “I…”

She was suddenly furious with herself for going to his office at all. She couldn’t stop thinking about the picture she’d broken; her every thought returning to V’s departure and broken glass.

The first time he had dismissed her, she had not known him and it hurt only in the sense of disappointment. In the absence of knowledge, she had been able to create an entire loathsome personality for Jumin Han in her imagination who was rude to serving staff and picked his nose, but now she knew him far too well. She knew he liked to be on the receiving end of kisses to the forehead and would smile in a decidedly crumpled fashion if caught off guard when waking. She knew that his voice reminded her of salted caramels and other desserts; a fact that only confused him when she mentioned it to him. He did not know at the time that she liked them the best. She knew that her Jumin was not the Jumin of the boardroom and for that reason she had never told him how close they had come to meeting before.

She was ashamed; she lowered her gaze to the carpet and steeled herself for a rejection that ultimately never came, for Jumin wrapped his arms around her so lightly that at first she barely registered the touch.

It had only been a matter of days since last he held her and she never wanted to let him go. She all but dissolved into his embrace, taking in the warmth of his body and his steady heartbeat; his amber cologne and crisp white shirt. Nari squeezed her eyes shut, feeling them blur with tears and already regretting the inevitable smudge of mascara across his collar. She never wanted to part from him; never wanted to leave. She never wanted to be anywhere that he was not.

Seconds turned into minutes and for one, brief, flickering instant she almost forgot why she had gone to him. In that silent room she was Mrs Han and she belonged there.

Jumin was the one to break the silence, and when he did, it explained everything.

“I was the last one there.”

Nari raised her head and rested her chin on his shoulder, recalling the panic in his voice as he demanded to know how such a thing had been allowed to happen, followed quickly by his furious need for a second opinion. All of a sudden she felt she understood why he had not been able to bring himself to look at her, even if it had never occurred to her to blame him.

“Jumin,” she said. “This isn’t-”

And almost instantly he shrugged off her embrace. Shrugged off any notion of sympathy or blamelessness.

“This is torture,” he said, turning away from her and retreating towards the desk. “I am sorry to have left you alone like this, but you must understand that I see no other choice.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I am your husband,” he said. “It is my job to provide for our future together. To set the example and lay the foundations.”

“Jumin…”

“At minimum, it is my responsibility to protect you from harm.”

He leaned over the desk, planting both hands on the wood to steady his weight.

“This isn’t your fault,” said Nari. “Sometimes…sometimes these things just happen.”

The irony did not escape her that when she received those sentiments she had not accepted them either. But this time around it was different. Jumin had not carried the child inside of his body. He had not been as unsure of himself as she had.

“No,” he said, standing up straight and lifting the whiskey bottle. “I should never have allowed you to continue planning the party. No. Forgive me. I should have organised you an assistant. Sent you in for more medical examinations and thorough tests. It was a failure on my part and an oversight. There is nothing more important to me than you, Jihyun and our future and the facts remain that I allowed this to happen.”

He unscrewed the bottle lid and poured a fresh glass. Nari bit her bottom lip.

“Are you coming home?”

She already knew the answer and did not know why she asked. Even so, she found herself rooted to the spot as he draped his jacket over her shoulders and kissed her to the forehead.

“I’ll come back when I deserve to.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Memento Mori is such an important fic to me and to explain why would take years, but all I’ll say is that part of the reason it took me such a long time to write it is that it had to be right. Nari was not an OC when I finished Violets are Blue and Memento Mori was originally intended as a direct sequel (I have been writing it for a good six months), though it became increasingly clear upon writing that the thing the story needed most was a unique, human main character. Vabverse came from a lot of the drafts of this fic (it predates many, if not all of the fics it references) and as much as it’s made me suffer, I owe it more than I can ever say.

 

 

As a newcomer to the RFA, Nari spent her first few days carefully examining Rika’s deserted apartment. There were almost certainly areas she should not visit and V had referenced private documents pertaining to the RFA, which left her in something of a quandary, for she knew she did not want to step on anyone’s toes, but at the same time did not know where anything was.

* * *

Consequently, Rika’s apartment never felt familiar to her, regardless of how many mornings she woke there. If anything, it was the opposite, a place she was not permitted to be and therefore an intruder any given time she was present. In the days that passed after her visit to C&R, she felt very much the same; waking alone in Jumin’s guest room and logging into the messenger as she ate her evening meal. In any given moment of silence, she found her attentions drifting to the front door, in much the same fashion she had in those first few days. Back then she had been anxious of the prospect that someone would barge in and demand an explanation, eyes darting to the keyhole at any sound she could not otherwise explain. This time around, she found herself doing the same thing, though not out of any sort of anxiety, but the hope that there might actually be someone on the other side of the door.

The evening before her second RFA party, she poured herself a glass of wine and examined the city lights through the penthouse window, wondering all of the while if V was somewhere out there with his camera.  

The messenger had been an interesting place of late. Although she, Jumin and V had not formally announced any sort of grief on their part, it would be unfair to suggest that none of the other members had realised that something was out of the ordinary. They were busy with their own lives, of course, between Yoosung moving into clinical study, Jaehee getting caught in the tidal wave of everything that happened at C&R, Zen’s busy schedule on set and Seven dividing his time between taking care of his brother following up on all possible leads in the Mint Eye investigation. Ordinarily it would not have taken two years to collate so much evidence, but now he was a freelancer and turning in his old job at the agency had burned bridges with all of his old contacts in one fell swoop.

No matter how busy their lives were, however, it did not go unnoticed by the other members that in the run up to the party Nari, Jumin and V never logged in at the same time, just as it did not particularly pass by Nari herself that the other members checked in in ways they believed would go unnoticed. Whether it was the combination of Jaehee’s public observation that Jumin’s recent decision to relocate to one of Chief Han’s penthouses in the business district had caused significant upheaval and her private one that she was sure Nari must have missed him terribly. Whether it was Zen’s out of the blue phone call and subsequent selfies during rehearsal, which Nari knew would never happened without some prior knowledge of Jumin’s absence.  Whether it was Yoosung’s phone call in the middle of the day to ask her food preferences because he’d made too many side dishes.

The only person who did not message her was Seven, but she never questioned his decision in that regard. Whenever he logged into the messenger it was to describe his brother’s behaviour and Nari knew it was unfair to presume he spend his time observing hers too.

And so it was that on the evening of that first party, she turned away from the window and paced the apartment instead; running her fingers through the fabric of the ballgown she had chosen for the party and switching on the light in Jumin’s home office. She had avoided the room semi-intentionally after returning from C&R without him, having had no real cause to go in. The party organisation had been in its final stages at the time of her hospitalization and most of the files in Jumin’s in tray related to the new house.

She knew she wasn’t forbidden in there. Any given time she hovered in the doorway, Jumin would smile and remind her that the penthouse was her home as much as his. There was no logical reason for her to feel exactly the same as when she first took in the paintings on Rika’s wall, but she jumped out of her skin the moment she heard knocking, as if she really had been caught stealing private documents.

She rushed to open the door so quickly that she spilled her wine en route, not knowing who she expected, though still managing to be disappointed when she opened the door to one of the guards.

“This came for you, Mrs Han,” he said. “We examined the contents; it’s safe.”

After the incidents with Glam Choi, Sarah and Mint Eye, all incoming mail was checked for dangerous materials before arriving at the penthouse interior. It had proven to be an unnecessary measure, but Jumin had overheard one too many horror stories to let the matter rest. Nari did not mind, even if the delay in mail made organizing the party slightly more complicated.

The package in question was a food hamper. Not only that, but it was heavy. So heavy that she regretted taking the wine glass to the door with her, for carrying the basket through the penthouse with only one hand was quite the strain. She set it down on the coffee table and flopped down onto the couch before leaning over to examine its contents.

She ignored the wine, the preserves, the bread, cheeses, meats, champagne flavour truffles, nougat and even the foie gras in favour of the card at the top, curious about who would send her such a gift. She did not recognise the writing on the card and even though she was well aware it did not belong to Jumin or to V, she was still disappointed to learn it had no connection to anyone she knew.  She laughed to herself as she slipped the card back inside of its envelope and leaned back into the couch, gazing up at the ceiling and closing her eyes, though opening them once again the moment she heard footsteps across the carpet and mewling at the front door.

Elizabeth had bounced right out of the master bedroom when Nari returned from C&R and, even though she could not speak, it was not difficult to understand that she too had expected something more. She had circled Nari several times and mewed at the door, expecting someone else to come through it who never actually did. Someone whose jacket Nari wore about her shoulders and earned her Elizabeth crawling into her arms and all but refusing to leave.

“It’s going to be alright,” she said, talking to Elizabeth, or so she thought. “We’re going to get out of this.”

* * *

For all of her preparation, every contract signed, every guest invited, the fact that she would actually have to attend the party arrived as an afterthought.

At exactly ten o'clock, a gaggle of strangers arrived at her door to style her hair and nails and apply her makeup, all while strapping her into the lavender gown she had chosen and even though she had scheduled the appointment herself, she found herself staring into space and only numbly engaging in their polite attempts at conversation.

When she caught a glimpse of herself for the first time, with billowing skirts and wearing so many layers of makeup that she barely recognised her own face beneath, she did not know what to do beyond stare. She went through the same motions only two years earlier, raising her phone camera to take a picture of herself smiling and posing in the same absurd fashion she might have done when sending a photo to her closest friends.  At the time, she had blushed even as she sent the photograph to Jumin, only to laugh when he responded with a blurred picture of Elizabeth Third.

This time around, she hovered over the dial, only to almost drop the phone entirely when it started ringing in her hand.

“H-hello?”

“Hello? Nari? It’s Jihyun. I wasn’t sure you’d answer.”

At the sound of his voice, she reached out to steady her weight against the kitchen counter.

“Jihyun, wh-”

She could hear water in the background; the lapping of the tides. It was familiar, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on why, like trying to claw onto a dream after waking.

“I’m sorry…I know I was supposed to present at the party today…but it seems like I won’t be going after all.”

“What are you talking about?”

For a moment Nari wondered if he had gone back to Jeju, but she knew she had only ever heard those particular acoustics on the phone.

“I’m sorry, I…” He laughed. “I have to go!”

He hung up and Nari stared at the phone in her hand, not only wondering what on earth had just happened but why it seemed so familiar. She wondered if he had mentioned something similar in conversations after 2:15, though she knew that wasn’t right. For the most part after 2:15, he talked about karma and candlelight. The word ‘karma’ wasn’t wrong, though, for the moment she landed on it she was reminded of tea leaves and burying her face in Jumin’s chest.

_“He said it that time too.”_

And she had not understood what he meant, rubbing her eyes and yawning as he described a phone call that arrived after 2am, which in turn reminded her of another call from another time, that arrived as she returned home from an interview with a women’s magazine. She had not thought much of it then, for although it was only a week after Rika almost died in his arms, he had seemed practically chipper.

“Where _are_ you?” 

She remembered laughing at the sudden sound of the ocean waves in the background, delighted by how unusual they were at the time.

“I’m where the sky meets the sea. I’ll take you sometime.”

The memory alone of what he said next sent her rushing into the master bedroom, high heels or no.

“That’s not an answer!”

“Fine, fine, you got me. I took a picture here once, of the sun shining on the ocean. It’s …how I met Rika.”

V kept annotated originals of all of his photographs in carefully organised leather bound albums. After any official showcase, he would store the film away separately, in case reprints were needed, all while noting down the date, the location and sometimes even his thoughts on each individual photograph. Some of the albums contained pressed flowers. Others contained ticket stubs and diagrams of butterflies. Somewhere, at the end of a particular album, was a photo of bed sheets and carefully transcribed verse about blue violets. Unlike his actual exhibits, which were left almost entirely to the imagination, looking through his albums was to reach into his soul.

She knew the one she was looking for. He had invited her to look inside when he transferred the pictures from his latest gallery into storage.

“They go in here, like this,” he had told her, though she had been too busy laughing at a picture of Jumin attempting to read a book while a much younger Elizabeth Third pawed at his face.

Nari reached for that same book and turned the pages in a flurry, not particularly paying attention to any of the picture but for the one she searched for, finally stopping at two pages near the back devoted entirely to pictures of the tides. In some of them, Rika stood at the railing, leaning over the edge with the sunlight shimmering through her hair just as it did the open water. Nari pretended she did not see and instead peeled out one of the photographs, turning it over to read the caption on the reverse.

“Alright then,” said Nari.

* * *

The car was an obvious place to start. Driver Kim already waited for her departure and did not question it when she called him up to the penthouse to view the back of a photograph.

Even so, she was sure they would never find him.

The stretch of road in his annotation seemed to span for miles. Nari spent most of the journey peering out of the window, watching for Jihyun at every street corner and every crowd, taking photographs of the top of every tree and the foam of every cup of coffee. She found herself drawn to every flash of blue; every inch of monochrome. Any time a tourist raised their camera, she stopped everything else to look.

When she finally saw him, they had left the city and she barely believed her eyes. At any moment, she might blink and find him gone.

He didn’t disappear, though, as she climbed out of the car. Instead he leaned against the railing in the same manner as Rika in the photograph Nari thought she had ignored.

“Jihyu-”

“Do you know where you are?”

The question took her off kilter and so she took a couple of steps towards the railings to take in the view.

“This used to be one of my favorite places in the world,” said Jihyun. “I came here often to take photographs…never got tired.”

“It’s….”

In truth, Nari didn’t know what to say. It was difficult to believe that such a place had ever been good for photography, with such grey skies overhead and little in the way of scenery. Jihyun laughed at her speechlessness, though the laughter did not quite meet his eyes.

“I told a lie here,” he said. “Before I met you.”

“A lie?”

“I don’t suppose it matters now,” he said. “But this place used to be beautiful.” 

He smiled out across the dark water with a contented smile. 

“You never got the chance to meet her as she was… but Rika was beautiful too.”

“Jihyun… you know what happened isn’t your fault.”

“You sound just like my therapist,” he said. “She also says I take on an inadequate amount of blame. Perhaps she’s right, but it’s difficult to ignore the pattern. I ruined this place. I ruined Rika and I also-”

He turned to her, his eyes skimming her frame. He did not finish the sentence but she knew his implication and it left the pair of them standing in silence, with nothing but the waves breaking against the shoreline by way of sound.

Truthfully, Nari had already known a little of his feelings where Rika was concerned. He did not speak of her often, but when he did it was clear that he did so from a place of pain. Nari had long suspected that after Rika almost bled out in his arms, it was not the shock that left him reeling, but something far worse.

She could not stand the thought that somewhere, deep down, he honestly believed he had ruined her. Not when the truth was so blatantly different. Every time he touched her, she believed she was beautiful, bursting into colour and transforming into something magnificent in his embrace. Jumin left her vulnerable. Jihyun left her glowing. Between them she was something she had never been before.

She took a deep breath.

“It’s not for me to tell you what you should feel, but I will say that, logistically speaking, there are probably more people out there in a better place because of you and the RFA. Whether they received funding from a charity fundraiser or they saw a photograph and felt inspired. It’s true that you’re to blame for some things, but I don’t for a second believe you’re to blame for all of them. We’ll-”

And at some point, though exactly when she couldn’t be sure, she realised she ought to take heed of her own advice.

“We’ll never know for sure who’s to blame in what happened to us,” she said. “But in all of the time we spend dividing it, none of us are moving on.”

Jihyun didn’t respond for a while and when he did, it was to glance across at her in a bemused fashion. He opened his mouth to say something and she flew into his arms, wrapping her arms around his body and taking in the coarse material of his coat against her cheek.

“Did you just…rehearse that?” He asked as he rested a hand in the centre of her back.

“I-” She blushed. “No…I.”

She snuggled her face into his person, wanting to absorb his look and feel so clearly that she never forgot, all while fearing she might hold him too tightly.

“All of this time you’ve been gone,” she said as his lips ghosted her forehead, “and already you’re making fun of me.”

Within seconds she was smiling, though.

“I missed you.”

At that, he held her tighter. Buried his face in her hair.

“So,” he glanced at his watch, “provided we don’t hit traffic, we should make it to the party hall just in time for the speech.”

“I’m not going,” said Nari as she untangled herself from his arms.

“Not going? But…I don’t understand.”

He held onto her hand only lightly as they returned to the car and stopped in his tracks entirely when she opened up the passenger door.

She had packed the food hamper onto the back seat and she supposed it did not look too out of place, given she had not indulged in any of its contents. Anyone might have presumed that she meant to take it to the party hall and present it to a guest.

The pet carrier, admittedly, was slightly more obscure. Driver Kim had positioned it carefully in the front passenger seat, but Elizabeth seemed to be under the impression she was going to the vet and, even as Jihyun peered inside of the car, she mewled in the same way she did when she got stuck on the kitchen counter and was too afraid to jump back down.

Back in the apartment, as she replaced Jihyun’s album and reached for her jacket, she had received a second urgent call from Jaehee, warning her that Jumin had not only cancelled the appointment with his driver but made no secondary arrangements

“He’s going to miss the party!”

And Nari knew then what she had to do; a plan that remained only too clear as she climbed into the back of the car with Jihyun, who by then had caught onto her intention.

“We’re going home,” she said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a handkerchief for his tear stained face; barely noticing that he silently ran his fingers over the fabric instead of using it, all the while remembering an identically embroidered one he gave away once to a stranger sobbing in an elevator.

* * *

In previous months, both Jumin and V had expressed concerns at exactly how much organisation Nari took into account when putting together her second party. She had made sure to schedule servers for the floor and ushers for the main entrances, leaving nothing for the RFA members to do but show up, make speeches and mingle. In the end she only had to make one phone call.

"M-Mr Han?”

Jaehee answered after only three rings.

“No. It’s me,” said Nari. “Listen, I need to ask a favour.”

“Of course. What do you need?”

“Did Jumin call you from his desk phone?”

* * *

After wrestling Elizabeth into her pet carrier and hoisting the food hamper into her arms, Nari had taken one last skim of the penthouse to see if there was anything else she ought to take with her. During that last check, she caught a glimpse of the picture from her wedding day, no longer in its frame.  She would have been lying if she said she no longer believed the woman in that photograph had never been hurt. That she had changed her mind and believed she knew far more of suffering or pain than would ever become apparent. It was something of a comfort, however, to know that that woman had no reason to be afraid of rejection and, as she pushed the button for the lift, she was sure the soft sunlight radiated through her nonetheless.

As the doors to the lift closed behind her, the absurdity of the situation began to sink in. She really was about to miss her own party and not only had convinced Jihyun to tag along with her, but he stood beside her quite happily with a food hamper in his arms. She really was standing there in a twenty thousand dollar dress clutching a pet carrier.

And before she knew it, she began to laugh.

For the first time in weeks, she no longer felt guilty. It was a stretch to say she no longer felt conflicted, but for the first time in a long time she could finally see solutions to problems that once felt like the end of everything. After leaving the hospital she had been so sure she would never know what it felt like to hope. She knew it would be a long time before she would feel completely whole again, but she had come a long way past running on empty.

This time around, Nari was prepared. She swiped her card through the reader and opened Jumin’s office door by a sliver, double checking the silent room before unfastening Elizabeth’s pet carrier and slipping it through the gap. She had been in his office more than once, climbing all over the bookshelves and prompting several anecdotes about disheveled paperwork, and so it was only a matter of moments few moments before she made a beeline for the desk. Nari reached up to switch on the light to Jumin’s cries of surprise and Elizabeth’s purrs.

He did not seem to have been drinking and Nari presumed he had not been in the office long at all from the fact that he still was rearranging his schedule. Elizabeth, of course, knew nothing of such matters and had jumped straight from the desk into his arms, leaving him with no choice but to sit and cradle her as she rubbed her face against his, only pausing to change her angle and lick his nose.

“N-Nari…Jihyu…” Jumin said, moving his face away from Elizabeth.

“You said you didn’t deserve to come home,” said Nari. “I thought we’d bring home to you!”

“There’s Camembert!” Piped up Jihyun behind her.

Once, a long time ago, Jumin described the way her voice soothed the darkest reaches of his soul in such a manner that he did not understand. She remembered the conflict playing out in his voice as well as his words; the same way that he looked at them then, from Jihyun rummaging through the hamper for the cheese to Nari herself beaming at him even though her makeup was smudged by tears. He glanced down at Elizabeth in his arms, who stared back up, unblinking.

“I….”

He smiled softly.

“I’ve been a fool,” he said. “Haven’t I?”

* * *

The first thing that crossed her mind when she opened her eyes was the bright afternoon sunlight; so bright that it hurt and she closed them again.

The grass was soft against her feet and someone-the same someone who only seconds ago had been holding their hands over her eyes-stroked her back.

“What do you think?”

She squinted, reaching up one hand to shield her face from the sunlight.

“I…”

It had been three months since the RFA party; three months since she sat on her husband’s lap to eat olives and between them they had dared their lover to eat his body weight in French bread. Those months had been long and bittersweet; everyone had laughed and cried and opened wounds in unexpected places. This time when she opened her eyes, Nari did not see the ocean but a house instead. A house with strong foundations positioned outside of the city and closer to the cherry farm. A house with a darkroom for V to process his photographs and a larger home office for Jumin. A house with several acres of garden.

And even though she no longer felt guilty, nor the immediate absence of the child that never was, Nari still found herself thinking of the child whose eyes were sometimes blue and sometimes grey and might have been born in that house under different circumstances.

“I’m sorry,” she said, turning to Jumin, suddenly conscious that he still waited for answer. “It’s wonderful. All of your hard work paid off.”

She didn’t say that she still felt empty, though by then she didn’t have to. He reached an arm around her shoulders and kissed her to the forehead, turning back towards the car where Jihyun fiddled with his camera.

“We have a surprise for you,” he said.

“You do?”

“It was Jihyun’s idea,” said Jumin, reaching to take her by the hand. “I…assisted.”

When Jihyun saw them approaching, he set aside his camera and climbed out of the car with an enormous smile on his face, suddenly looking for all of the world like a child set loose in a candy store.

“What are you up to?” Nari asked, glancing from one to the other and receiving nothing by way of an explanation. Instead she watched as Jihyun clambered up into the passenger side seat of the moving van.

When he hopped back down, he had a plant pot in his arms, which in turn contained a sapling.

“This is…” He said, searching for the right words, even if by then she had worked out their intentions.

The tree would flourish and grow, spread its branches and reach the sky even if their child never would.

Slowly, Jihyun lowered the plant pot into her hands.

“Now then,” said Jumin, clearing his throat and keeping his composure, “where should it go?”


End file.
